Scripting News for 3/13/2006

Todd Cochrane at Geek News is a long-time Movable Type user. He isn’t happy with how the product is evolving. The first comment is from Jay Allen, from Six Apart, the company that makes the product. Interesting back and forth between a customer and a vendor. 

It’s great to have the Sopranos back. The season opener was surprising, even for a show that’s often filled with surprises. 

Old folks boogie 

Last night’s dinner was pretty fantastic. They’ve changed something at PC Forum, the first night used to be the speaker’s dinner, but apparently not any more. The buffet dinner was absolutely first class, I ate lamb, paella, a wonderful spinach dish, lots of great conversation, it was wonderful to see old friends I hadn’t seen in some cases in 15 or 20 years! We’ve all aged, quite visibly, but it’s cool to reconnect after so long. Even the old rivalries have faded as the former powerhouses are either gone or faded (Lotus, Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, AOL, Sun, Oracle, etc).

I spent a long time talking with Bret Fausett, who Mike Arrington describes as the “Dave Winer of ICANN.” Brett is a longtime Scripting News reader, who I had never met face to face, but whose blog I read regularly, and whose circles have regularly intersected mine over the years. Not surprisingly we had a lot to talk about, and had both figured a lot of the same things out. Now if we could just get everyone else on the same page! 🙂

Sat next to Jeremy Allaire from Brightcove, and confirmed that I do understand that they’re seriously re-inventing television in the context of the Internet.

And while I missed Esther’s opening remarks, people say that there were a lot of ideas from the Unconferences manifesto in her talk. She’s going to try to include the audience more in the discussion. It’s good to see she’s feeling the influence, but I think they could go farther, faster, by having a session or two that’s done totally unconference-style, to give the community (she has one too, even though the talk here is of other communities) some experience. This would give everyone a data point to think about in the coming year, the minds could accomplish a lot, with the information and the time.

It’s been ten years since I was at a PC Forum, and while the onstage conversation is as ungrounded as ever, the place is humming, there’s thriving going on, once again. I came back last, at the height of the dotcom mania, to find the river was flowing somewhere else. It was quiet here, not many people, not very much to talk about, and what was being talked about seemed to be covered better elsewhere. Today, more than ever it’s the social events that are the pulse, and luckily we have a lot to talk about, and old friendships to renew. It’s a sweet event, so far, and that’s a surprise, a pleasant one.

Why I will stop blogging 

I can do it, folks, I have already, in some sense, stopped one of my rivers, and soon, probably before the end of 2006, I will put this site in mothballs, in archive mode, and go on to other things, Murphy-willing of course.

It’s been a long time coming. When I started blogging, depending on how you look at it, either in 1994, 1996 or 1997, I had different goals, and happily the goals have been accomplished. Billions of Websites now no longer seems an outrageously ambitious goal. We’re pretty close to a billion, I suspect. The goal was to create tools that would make it easy for everyone to have a site, and then more specifically a chronological one. That’s done.

I wanted programming to turn upside down, to have the Internet be the platform instead of Microsoft and Apple. That worked too. APIs on web apps are now commonplace, and a basis for comparison between offerings. While user interfaces have gotten better, of course, there’s been a steady flow of new ideas in how my work connects with yours, and vice versa, and we’re doing it without a platform vendor controlling it.

I wanted decentralized news. We can do for ourselves what the pros haven’t been doing. And politics — I don’t doubt that the House of Representatives will be filled with bloggers, if not in 2006, then surely in 2008. There’s no turning back on any of it. The 20th Century is fading and the new century is going strong. There really was a big shift as the calendar rolled over, and I’m totally glad to be a part of it.

So there’s the first part of my reason. Blogging doesn’t need me anymore. It’ll go on just as well, maybe even better, with some new space opened up for some new things. But more important to me, there will be new space for me. Blogging not only takes a lot of time (which I don’t begrudge it, I love writing) but it also limits what I can do, because it’s made me a public figure. I want some privacy, I want to matter less, so I can retool, and matter more, in different ways. What those ways are, however, are things I won’t be talking about here. That’s the point. That’s the big reason why.